Rebellion of the hungry

In 2007 more than 850 million people worldwide went hungry, everyday 25.000 of them died of the direct consequences of undernourishment. As if that wouldn´t be bad enough it´s alarming to hear that the number of hungry people has increased dramatically as a result of the enormous increase of the prices for basic foods.

But what´s the reason for the recent price explosion? According to the governments of the industrialised countries also in this case the main inflater is the unstoppable demand of the Asian region and the other emerging markets. On the other side environmental organisations blame bio fuel for the boost.

However in my opinion the problem originated elsewhere and started long before china was trendy and bio fuel a problem. The only thing is that through bio fuel and China the problem came to light. But to explain what i mean let´s go back to the year 1970 when new machines, fertilizers and new kinds of seeds revolutionized the whole agriculture. And as you know when the supply of a commodity grows but the demand stays constant it falls in price and that’s exactly what the agrarian commodities did. Well actually falling prices for food aren´t a bad thing wouldn´t there be the side effect that now thousands of farmers earn nothing anymore. So the governments of the industrialised countries had a fantastic idea, they just paid subsides for all agrarian products of the farmers so that the farmers could survive. The plan worked out the people had food in abundance and the farmers became money for producing too much, there was only one thing the politicians overlooked. Because instead of trowing the overproduces food away the farmers began to sell their commodities to developing countries. It sounds strange but it´s cheaper to carry potatoes from Europe to Africa than growing them there and so the clever industrialised counties began to sell their overproduced food there. After a certain time these governments even liked the idea of selling our goods on the markets of the third world and I guess that´s why the developing countries were not allowed to impose protective duties against this foods. The consequences for the farmers of the developing countries has been disastrous not that they just lost their existence they also lost their farming land because when you don´t use it for a longer period of time it it gets lost. So everything was fine the poor people worked to buy our food and we could use them the win other commodities we needed.

But then during the turn of millennium everything changed china climbed up to a net importer of food and just like China many other emerging market countries built cities on their reproductive land. Also the industrialised countries discovered bio fuel and how higher the oil price gets the more agrarian commodities will be used for that

What is sure is that we have to find a way that every county has the chance to produce its own food only this would solve the problem.